routine and emptied the cash register even as he was kicking the silent alarm into action, but Wesley was out the door with the money before the police arrived.
He found a hotel on 42nd Street near Eighth and checked in with his military duffel, his gun, and $725 from the holdup. A few hours later, the room’s door opened—Wesley grabbed for his pistol, but the shot that blasted the pillow out from under his face froze him.
On the way out of the hotel, Wesley looked at the desk clerk, very carefully. The clerk was used to this; as a professional rat, he was also used to threats of vengeance from everyone who walked past him in handcuffs.
But Wesley didn’t say anything at all.
The night court set bail at ten thousand dollars, and the judge asked if he had any money for a bondsman. Wesley said, “I’ve got around seven hundred dollars,” and the arresting officer called him a smart punk and twisted the handcuffs hard behind his back.
11/
Wesley sat in the Tombs for two weeks until his “free” lawyer finally appeared. In what sounded like an instant replay of years ago, the lawyer told him that a guilty plea would get him about ten years behind his record, and all that. Wesley said okay—a trial was out of the question.
On the way back from the brief talk with his lawyer, Wesley was stopped by four black prisoners who blocked his path.
“Hey, pussy! Where you goin’?”
Wesley didn’t answer—he backed quickly against the wall and wished he had his sharpened bedspring with him. He watched the blacks the way he had watched North Koreans. They were in no hurry—guards never came onto the tier anyway.
“Hey, boy, when you lock in tonight, I goin’ to be with you. Ain’t that nice?”
Wesley didn’t move.
“An’ if you don’t go for that, then we all be in with you ... so I don’t want no trouble when I come callin’, hear?”
They all laughed and turned back to their cells. Wesley walked carefully to his own cell and reached for the bedspring under his bunk. It was gone.
Every night the doors to the individual cells were automatically closed by electricity. Wesley just sat and thought about it for a couple of hours until supper was over. He refused the food when the cart came by his cell and watched the runner smile knowingly at him. The smile convinced Wesley it wouldn’t do any good to ask for another shank to replace the one stolen from him.
At 8:30, just before the doors were supposed to close, the four men came back. The biggest one, the talker, came forward with a smile.
“Okay, sweetheart, decision time. Just me, or all of us?”
Wesley looked frightened and defeated—he had been practicing in his scrap of mirror for an hour.
“Just you,” he said, voice shaky.
The other three slapped palms with the biggest one, mumbled something about “seconds,” and ambled off, laughing. They were about fifty feet down the corridor when the cell doors started to slowly close. Wesley knelt down before the big man who unzipped his fly and stepped toward Wesley ... who sprang forward and rammed his head and shoulders into the bigger man’s stomach like a spear. They both slammed backwards into the cell wall, and Wesley whipped his knee up, trying to drive it into the big man’s chest right through his groin. The big man shrieked in pain and slumped and Wesley’s hands were instantly around his throat, thumbs locking the Adam’s apple. Just before the cell doors closed, Wesley stuffed the man’s head into the opening, his hands turning chalk- white with the strain. The three others raced back but were too late; they could only watch as the steel door crushed the big man’s skull as easily as if it were cardboard. Their own screams brought the guards, clubs up and ready.
12/
Wesley spent the night in solitary, with a special watch. The special watch reported that he went to sleep promptly at 10:30, and slept right on through the night.
13/
Wesley’s new lawyer was from the same brotherhood as the others. He ran the usual babble about pleading guilty to a reduced charge, escaping what the PD always called “the heavier penalties permissible under the statutes.”
“This could be Murder One, kid, but I think I can get the DA to—”
“Hold up. How could it be Murder One? I didn’t fucking plan to waste that motherfucker. I was protecting myself, right?”
“The Law says that if you think about killing someone for even a split-second before you do it, you’re guilty of premeditated murder.”
“If I hadn’t killed him, he would have taken me off.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Sure you do.”
Wesley thought it through. He finally concluded that shooting the sergeant in Korea wasn’t premeditated—he didn’t remember thinking about it at all, much less for a whole split-second.
It was too much to work through right away, so Wesley fell back on the one thing he trusted: waiting. He refused to plead guilty, so he sat for another nine months in the Tombs awaiting trial. Finally, the PD came back with an offer to plead guilty to Manslaughter in exchange for a suspended sentence, running concurrent, on the
